In conventional photography, the camera must typically be focused at the time the photograph is taken. The resulting image may have only color data for each pixel; accordingly, any object that was not in focus when the photograph was taken cannot be brought into sharper focus because the necessary data does not reside in the image.
By contrast, light-field images typically encode additional data for each pixel related to the trajectory of light rays incident to that pixel when the light-field image was taken. This data can be used to manipulate the light-field image through the use of a wide variety of rendering techniques that are not possible to perform with a conventional photograph. In some implementations, a light-field image may be refocused and/or altered to simulate a change in the center of perspective (CoP) of the camera that received the image.
Light-field images raise particular challenges for applying effects such as motion blur. According to techniques used with conventional two-dimensional images, image capture may be carried out at a high frame rate to remove motion blur. Then, the motion blur may be reconstructed by extracting a motion vector to assess the rate of motion of the object. However, such techniques do not support the image processing techniques described above for light-field images, such as changing the center of perspective, as they are limited to a single perspective.